Figure 2

The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb experiment. (a) The original optical setup [30] with a light-sensitive bomb inside a MZI. There is a non-zero probability that a single measurement detects the bomb without an interaction, i.e., the photon takes the lower path and hits detector D₁. More detail description of this apparatus can be found in the text. (b) Quantum circuit for this experiment, where the first qubit represents the photon and the second qubit reveals the status of the bomb. (c) Our experiments on a range of IBM quantum computers in 2020. The dashed-dotted line at 0.33 is the theoretical value from Eq. (1). Each dot represents an execution of the experiment on the corresponding quantum computer. The solid black lines are the average value of dots. The device errors and standard deviations are 9.3%, 4.9%, 6.2%, 7.4%, 4.1%, 4.0%, 5.3% and 0.034, 0.047, 0.060, 0.029, 0.017, 0.025, 0.028, in order given above, from left to right